SEK: The novel reads very much like the world it describes—utterly familiar, yet slightly off at all points. Was that your intent? (For example, on 59, you describe “Something like a body or a person,” which makes perfect sense, yet is incredibly disturbing. What is like a body or a person that’s not a body or a person?)

JV: I hike a lot in North Florida, and from a distance, things look like other things. A bat can metamorph into a bird when seen closer. A creature on a log becomes just a stubby branch. A seeming tree trunk is actually a bear. You think you are going north, but suddenly, through some daydream of lapse of attention, you get turned around.

These are, in a sense, reminders to us that the real world is stranger than we usually think. Imagine being able to spy on the processes going on around you while even walking down the sidewalk on your street—the plants employing photosynthesis and speaking to each other in chemical emissions, the ants with their pheromone trails, the fungi with their spores. Why, there’s still crowded and noisy cosmopolitan situation all around you, but you can’t experience any of it because your senses are these stunted, incomplete systems.

You’ve got eyes that can’t see the whole spectrum. A cat would laugh at your stupid sense of smell. Your sense of taste is pathetic compared to many creatures. Your sense of touch is put to shame by your average gecko. So the world is in a sense laughing at you anyway, or on some level ignoring you completely, and your sole contribution is the ability to tread too heavily on a dandelion and break its stem. So if we’re honest the world should feel slightly off at times. The world should at times reveal some glint or glimmer of greater processes ongoing. Something like a body or a person. Something like a shadow or a creature. Something like a sudden clue…

SEK: On page 111, you note that the pile of journals describing Area X will soon become Area X itself. This strikes me as a literal version of “contact narratives,” in which what an explorer writes about an area he discovers becomes how future generations understand it. (Describing cities of gold in the “New World” leading explorers to “discover” such cities, even though they only ever existed in print.) Are these books [in "the Southern Reach" trilogy] an exercise in, call it, “creative geography”? Re-shaping the world by describing it?

JV: I must admit my minor in college was Latin American history, and I’m sure there’s a sedimentary layer in the back of my brain that, in soaking all of that conflicted and difficult chronology, has peeked out through some of the observations in Annihilation. I guess I was also thinking of the journals from the prior expeditions as almost being like the bones of the explorers, in word form. This is where they washed up, their instruments useless, all logic revealed as merely construct to push them through the day.

And, yes, there is perhaps a parallel: explorers and exploiters who are culturally so different and from such a different landscape that the very land seems to reject them, even when they seem to have conquered it. I’m not particularly fond of missionaries or of conquerors or empires, all of which strike me as examples of dreaming poorly but, alas, doing so across a vast continuum of human endeavor, to the brutal detriment of all who push back with perhaps a more sustainable and humane vision of the world…

(This will be the second-to-last Who-related visual rhetoric posts for a bit. It concerns the complicated conclusion of the fifth season, which is why it's the second-to-last. It's also a sequel of sorts to this post, though I reserve the right to introduce new material and present spoilers so inscrutable to the casual fans that unless you've watched the series three times through they won't even register as such.)

At the conclusion of "The Pandorica Opens" we learned that all of the Doctor's old enemies had formed a committee and decided the Doctor was responsible for the universe unwriting itself. They weren't wrong. As I noted in the post on "Vampires of Venice," the Doctor tells Rosanna:

He may have even wanted to believe this at the time, but he changed his mind in the next episode, "Amy's Choice," after vicariously experiencing the death of Rory Williams through Amy Pond, who asked him quite the cutting question. If you can't go back and change time,

At the time, the only answer he could provide was that he someone becoming accustomed to either causing mass extinctions or standing idly by while entire species are wiped from existence. The former may be a more morally reprehensible action, but the passivity of the latter brings him no glory. In order to redeem himself—and I'm going to insist that this season is, among other things, a redemption narrative—he needs to rethink his relation to universe he tends. Which is precisely what happens in the episode "The Big Bang." He discovers that the point of him is that he can change time, so writer and showrunner Steven Moffatt and director Toby Haynes proceed to do exactly that. "The Big Bang" opens with a repetition of the slow tracking shot from the first episode of the season, "The Eleventh Hour":

Monday, 28 November 2011

In the previous post, we learned that the Doctor can accomplish quite a bit by yelling at things. Admonishment, it could be said, is his only consistent source of power. He has the uncanny ability to be clever at precisely the right moment, and if he lacks the tools required to bring his clever plan to fruition, he possesses an improvisonal knack for making do with whatever's at hands. As a list of powers go, the Doctor fares quite favorably to no known hero—though he could be compared to a Malthussian Lex Luthor. (He did steal the TARDIS, after all.) Point being, by the time the Doctor regenerates into his Matt Smith incarnation, his reputation is such that he can stand on a rooftop, unkempt and in other people's clothes, and stare down the very same spaceship that, moments earlier, was going to incinerate the entire planet.

Quite the reputation, that is, but what has he done to deserve it? "Been very clever with stuff on multiple occasions" covers it, but inadequately. Unlike Superman, the Doctor possesses no singular power that would require him to face a particular kind of foe in a particular type of manner. He can stand alone against an alien armada precisely because he lacks any clearly defined (or plausible) method of doing so. To quote the man himself in "The Pandorica Opens," in which the Doctor finds himself trapped beneath Stonehenge and the Earth surrounded by an alien armada:

Note how director Toby Haynes monkeys around with the shots in this short sequence. In the first frame, the Doctor is looking out the door, the locked Pandorica behind him, and he looks sheepish not only because of his slumped shoulders and pathetic frown, but because he's being oppressed by the compositional elements of the frame. Amy Pond and River Song flank him, and even though the shot scale is medium close-up—meaning the camera captures him from the waist to the top of his head—Haynes uses an unusually high level of framing, which creates an awkward amount of space between the top of the Doctor's head and the upper limit of the frame. This unusual level of framing makes it so the compositional oppressiveness parallels the narrative—or vice versa, as the relation between the narrative and composition is interdependent in film. In other words, it's as if Haynes squished the Doctor but left the camera in the same position it occupied pre-squishing.

But wait! There is a second frame in which the Doctor has one of his brilliant ideas!

Saturday, 13 August 2011

I’ve stayed my pen about the riots in London because they’re happening in what I consider to be my London. What I mean is: when that Eyjafjallajoekull erupted andtrapped me in England, I spent about 80 percent of the time staying with a friend in Crouch End, and while my friend taught or held office hours or sat through faculty meetings, I would wander the streets of North London. So strong is my affinity for the area that I ended up supporting Tottenham—and you can see where this is going. I’ve invested in the area in the way that only an idle victim of circumstance can: fully cognizant of the illegitimacy of his claim upon it, but feeling an abiding connection to it anyway. Knowing this, Michael Sayeau—who wrote eloquently about his experience for n+1—recommended I follow the riots via Twitter, and so I spent an anxious evening reading about the destruction of a place I have no right to care for as greatly as I do.

One of the most surreal aspects of watching the riots unfold on Twitter and a grid of Twitpics was that it quickly became apparent that people weren’t simply commenting on the looting, they were actively coordinating it. ”We should hit this shop next,” one person would write, only to be shouted down by a group of people who thought it more prudent to hit another shop instead. It quickly became apparent that an unusual organization had emerged through the clutter of social media: it operated openly and encouraged criminality, all while imposing order on a what otherwise would’ve appeared to be the random development of a conflagration.

This use of technology to outwit and outstrip a government’s ability to react to escalating unrest should have immediately struck me as familiar, being that it’s the premise of Adam Roberts‘s novel New Model Army—a book in which I’m not only thanked in the acknowledgments, but in which I believe I make an appearance. (Adam denies it, but if the crazy academic in a brown suit and a Watchmen t-shirt isn’t me, he at least belongs to my tribe.) Point being: the connection between the acephalous organization of Adam’s radically democratic military organizations and what I was witnessed on Twitter last week speaks to the power of speculative fiction and, more frighteningly, the pace at which contemporary society makes good on its speculations.

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years. I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders. So here goes:

The formal elements of the opening five minutes of Nausicaä conspire to disorient the audience. For example, the film opens with a medium close-up, i.e. one that captures the upper torso of a character in a manner that allows the audience to clearly read a character's face without making it seem, as close-ups often do, as if the camera (and with it, the audience) are violating that character's personal space. In short, a medium close-up is designed to create a sense of comfortable intimacy between character and audience, e.g.

That's obviously a terrible example, because Miyazaki's deliberately flouting film convention in order to make Lord Yupa seem inscrutable. The audience is disoriented because its members know how medium close-ups are conventionally employed (even though they might not know they do) and the violation of those conventions creates a little anxiety. If Yupa were to remove that mask, the audience would experience a slight sense of relief because the shot now conforms to their expectations. But if a director continues to confound them, the cumulative effect will create an uncomfortable audience, which is what Miyazaki wants:

First: in conventional terms, this shot sequence is backwards. Establishing shots like the one above are intended to introduce the principle elements of a location and their spatial relation to each other. They are typically framed as extreme long shots in deep focus (as it makes little sense to introduce an audience to a collection of unfocused blobs), and they typically appear before medium close-ups of the characters contained within it. Reversing the typical shot sequence, as Miyazaki does here, results in the audience being surprised by the surroundings.

This formal trick works even when those surroundings are less alien than they are here. For example, imagine a medium close-up of a couple of men standing around outside:

Saturday, 20 March 2010

Why is it
any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they
just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on
your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use
as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life. That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers. The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton.

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play. That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists. Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it.

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship. They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.

Sunday, 07 March 2010

(Because Amazon's taking away your almost-free books, I thought I'd offer up a free excerpt from mine. It's neither finished nor particularly good, but turning stacks of virtual notes into viable prose is a messy process and what's the point of even having a blog if you can't ask your readers to help straighten up your mess? It ends rather abruptly because I need to mark essays, but rest assured, it will arrive at the obvious destination soon enough.)

The inaugural issue of the British comic anthology
Warrior, published in March of
1982, contained two stories scripted by a 29-year-old Alan Moore that could not
have been more different in tone or conception. The first told the story of an
attempted rape in a dystopian future: corrupt police accost a young woman, but
before they can rape her, they are murdered by a man who explains, in iambs, why
he came to her aid and why he is about to blow up the British Parliament. In
stark contrast to the opening chapter of V
for Vendetta, Moore’s second contribution comes from “an age
of lingering innocence, an age of golden dreams,” and recounts how, in 1956,
“the Miracleman Family” repelled the invasion of a terrorist organization from
the future called the “Science Gestapo.”

These serialized stories represent two
possible career paths for young Moore: he can become a writer who creates and
develops original ideas, as he does in V for
Vendetta; or he can become the kind of whose genius is particular to
comics, i.e. one whose talent
lies in the ability to transform a caricature into a character of compelling
psychological depth. (Characters in mainstream comic books are, after all, a
form of communal property: they belong to a company, and are subject to regular
refashioning and repurposing.) Although its cartoonish art and quaint language
could hardly differ more from the harsh lines and sharp tongues of V for Vendetta, the final eight panels of
the Miraclemanstory depict the
process that, over the course of the decade, will become Moore’s signature style.

Reunited after preventing the “Science Gestapo” from traveling to the past by
defeating them in the future, the Miracleman clan shares a laugh: “S-so…Garrer
was never here, because he never left 1981! It sounds unbelievable,” says Kid
Miracleman. “Maybe so, Kid,” Miracleman responds, “But that’s the way it was…or
was it?” As they laugh, the focus shifts from the family to Miracleman alone
and the narrator, whose role up to this point had been providing linguistic
gristle for the duo-specific word-picture relations—in which the words and the
pictures say the same thing, as in books designed to teach children to
read—begins quoting an ominous-sounding passage from
Nietzsche:

Monday, 30 November 2009

[T]his year the [Booker] prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

I say this not because Adam's a personal friend (although he is), and not because I've edited some of his other novels (although I have), but because it actually is the most intriguing novel I've read this year. Admittedly, I can't say whether it's the best novel published in 2009, because I only read three novels published this year (The City and the City, Inherent Vice, and Asterios Polyp), so I'm limited to saying that Yellow Blue Tibia merely outpaces the latest by Mieville and Pynchon, as well as David Mazzucchelli's decade-in-the-making masterpiece. A quick plot summary before moving on to what makes the book sing.

In 1946, Josef Stalin ordered Konstantin Skvorecky, Ivan Frenkel, and a few other Russian science fiction writers to create a new threat against which the Soviet people could unite (as they had against Germany). They concoct a plot in which invisible radiation aliens invade the U.S.S.R., but it opens when "The Americans launch a rocket to explore space [and the] aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation ... Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation" (25). Before they can sketch the invasion out in greater detail, Stalin disbands the group. Years pass. Frenkel accidentally reconnects with Skvorecky shortly before the Challenger disaster. The plan they concocted for Stalin seems to be coming true. Skvorecky, a translator, meets two American scientologists and a Muscovite taxi driver named Ivan Saltykov. There is a murder. Someone or something threatens Chernobyl. Love happens.

That is not, I grant, the most conventional summary of the novel—if they're more your bag you can try here, here or here, or if you're feeling more adventurous, here—but for me to say more would not despoil the novel so much as ruin the pleasure afforded by Adam's narrative gamesmanship. I'm more than happy to spoil a simple plot point, but I would prefer to avoid ruining the interpretive tension created by the contradictory accounts of those simple plot points. Were I to concretize any one of them, I would not only be usurping the role of a character within the novel, I would be reproducing the book's ingenious structural conceit.

Unlike a A Scanner Darkly, in which conflicting realities are focalized through the muddle of drug-induced paranoia, the narrator of Yellow Blue Tibia is fully aware that he lives in a world structured by other people's understanding of reality. From the obsessive-compulsive taxi driver, Ivan Saltykov, who returns to the scene of the crime because he must retrace his path exactly, to the UFO enthusiasts who mistake Skvorecky's denial of the existence of extraterrestrials for an exercise in dialectical thinking, the characters in the novel influence the narrative less through their actions than their rationale for engaging in them. Dramatic irony is both deployed and undermined, resulting in a comedy of ideological errors that ranges from the subversively slapstick (Krapp's Last Tape as performed by an inept Moscow detective) to the deeply structural (the evisceration of Scientology's theoretical and psychology underpinnings).

But, because I'm a blogger and bloggers are narcissists, I want to call attention to the rude portrait Adam drew of me in the novel. In a comment attached to a post from 2005 that has since been rescinded—it was a little too revealing about someone in my department and thus fell into the category of material I wrote as "A. Cephalous" that's not suitable for publication under my own name—Adam posted a link to what he referred to as "a portrait of Mr. Non-Capo." Five years later, he included in Yellow Blue Tibia the following:

The lift door creaked open, and a fantastically shrunken and wrinkled old woman shuffled out, carrying a string bag bulging with provisions. Her head was located in the space directly in front of her torso, as if her neck fitted into the centre of her sternum rather than between her shoulders[.]

Wednesday, 04 November 2009

It must have been difficult to be a conservative last night. On the
one hand, you threw your muscle behind your perfect candidate and he
lost a district which last went Democratic back before the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts fought for control of the GOP; on the other, you got a television show made especially for you! The remake of V is an exercise in allegorical drift-correction: the original series was supposed to be based on Sinclair Lewis's novel about creeping government fascism, which was itself an allegory about demagogic dangers posed by the likes of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who were themselves perceived to be homegrown Hitlers, but then Star Wars
happened and the network demanded Space Nazis, so the fascists became
lizards and, instead of wanting to rule America, they wanted to eat
Americans, meaning they cured diseases for the same altruistic reasons
we pump cattle full of antibiotics. That, as they say in the business,
is some mighty powerful drift, and it requires some equally unsubtle
mastery to correct course.

In the original series, the Nazi
parallel was made palpable via regalia and youth groups; in the remake,
they do so via a Maddow-esque Scott Wolf
asking the leader of the Visitors if they offer universal health care.
Note the slight shift in the assumption required to move from alien to
fascist? The expert in fictional fascisms did:

I simultaneously loved the "universal health care" line and thought it was a bit hamfisted. I do like that it all bothers Jonathan Chait so much,
but I think they could have been a bit more subtle. However, it's worth
recalling that the visitors in the original series promised to cure
diseases as well. I think Chait goes overboard too when he says the
show is a loveletter to the Tea Party movement.

Jonah
Goldberg is, it goes without saying, wrong, but in this case his error
is understandable because he was instrumental in creating the
conditions that made it possible. The only people for whom universal health care signals a creeping fascism are 1) people who were convinced by the "arguments" proffered in Liberal Fascism,
and 2) people who believe Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the future of
the Republican Party. Granted, there is a substantial overlap between
those camps, but my point is that unless you share core beliefs with,
broadly speaking, the Tea Party movement, that reference fails to refer. The allegory only works if universal health care is a link in the chain that secures space lizards to fascism.

Monday, 02 November 2009

If I were to tell you that a television series in which John Cho (a.k.a. the Harold who went to White Castle) consistently steals scenes from Joseph Fiennes (of the Acting Fienneses) exists, you'd likely laugh at me. But it does. Every Thursday night brings us another bizarrely-paced episode of Flashforward. Loosely based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel (which I haven't read) of the same name, the show follows a team of FBI agents investigating the origin of a worldwide loss of consciousness. For two minutes and thirteen seconds, everyone on the planet lost consciousness and (as per the title) caught an exclusive showing of their lives six months in the future (29 April 2010).* The premise is interesting enough, and when the narrative focuses on the secular equivalent of arguments about predestination, the show works.

For example, because so many people seemed to have obscenely meaningful flashforwards, even those people who saw themselves walking into an unfamiliar parking garage imbue theirs with meaning. The parking lot, after all, may only be unfamiliar now because a character hasn't been fired from one firm and hired by another. The characters mostly know this, but watching them struggle against the inevitability of the mundane makes for compelling television; however, the motor of the show is the drunken memory of Fiennes's Agent Mark Benford, who saw himself in his office 1) struggling to make sense of the whiteboard on which he and his team are collating the evidence of what caused the blackout and 2) being hunted by a team of assassins. The first element of his flashforward presents clues worthy of a Robbe-Grillet novel, in that Agent Benford is a recovering alcoholic trying to make sense of a half-seen evidence board while being pounded by the guilt of drinking after seven years of sobriety. He knows himself to be an unreliable narrator—is burdened by the fact of it—and yet he struggles to recreate the whiteboard as he remembers it from his flashforward.

It's the second element of the flashforward that troubles me, not because I have qualms about David S. Goyer works featuring assassins (perish the thought), but because such action threatens to overwhelm the legitimately compelling high-conceptual quality of the show. This is not to say the two can't be combined: in one episode, for example, none of the FBI agents involved in a shootout bother to take cover because they know they're going to be alive six months later. But unless the writers veer into Longshot territory and have characters jump off buildings for the thrill of learning the strained chain of happenstance to which the universe must resort to keep them alive another six months, they run the risk of turning half of each episode into a tensionless exercise in faked foolhardiness. (The law of diminishing returns actually kicked in before that first action sequence ended.)

You might object that viewers have been so thoroughly conditioned by a lifetime of televisual convention that they'll find such scenes compelling even though they know they shouldn't. I'm not sure I'd disagree. Still, that the writers find it necessary to insert action sequences into a series driven by a complex premise smacks of pandering to an audience who will never watch the show. Such viewers are more interested in the caliber of the gun than the life of the person shooting it, and as such will never devote an hour a week to a show half-occupied by characters discussing whether their attempts to circumvent the inevitable are responsible for it coming to pass. The actions of the characters frequently remind of "The Opposite," the episode of Seinfeld in which George decides that since he's spent his entire life doing what he thought was right and ended up himself, his only chance at happiness would be to go against his instinct and always do the opposite. The wrinkle on Flashforward, obviously, is that they maybe ended up wherever they did on 29 April 2010 because they decided to do the opposite, so the only way to prevent their flashforward from happening would be to go with their instincts. That's the show's strength: a premise that compels its characters to constantly reevaluate their decision-making processes and reinterpret what they think they thought they knew.

As for the show's weaknesses, in addition to the bizarre directorial decisions and resultant pacing problems, Flashforward suffers from some unexpectedly poor performances. Joseph Fiennes pulls a reverse-Costner, clearly burdened by the labor of producing his spotty American accent; and Courtney B. Vance, formerly serviceable in the role of a legal-minded bureaucrat on Criminal Intent, clearly forgot how to act. Unlike Fiennes, Vance is beyond redemption. (I believe the purpose of the frequent allusions to Fiennes's previous roles—a recent episode tossed off lines about him being a Shakespeare of one thing and a Luther of another—is a deliberate attempt to remind him that he's talented.) Should the show succeed, it will be (as the most recent addition to the cast demonstrates) despite itself. In point of fact, the main purpose of this post is to memorialize its potential before it turns into irredeemable dreck, that way when it's canceled with high irony six month hence, I can justify why I stuck around for its inevitable decline.

*The show-runners either haven't decided whether these events are witnessed, as if by a third party, or experienced through the character's own eyes. Olivia Benford, the wife of Fiennes's character, sometimes remembers her flashforward from the perspective of the other person in it; but she also remembers it from her own perspective, as well as one in which she can see both herself and the other man. This could be sloppiness, but it could also be a fairly sophisticated statement about the non-iterative aspect of persistently recalled memories ... but I'm not a betting man.

Sunday, 11 October 2009

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose. However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear. "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear. "What has he to do with us now?"

That just scans something awful. In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics. In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint. (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.) She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could. The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future. For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster). Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional. When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster.

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be. The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post.

Monday, 24 August 2009

. . . to the person who claims the Pang Brother's 2006 film Re-Cycle is "THE most EMO movie EVER" as if that were a good thing. The film, though, is THE most SOMETHING movie EVER, but I'm not sure what. The list could include:

THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER

THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER

THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER

THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER

THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

As I said: THE most SOMETHING movie EVER. I'll start with the minor complaints and work my way forward:

THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER

Either those two are a little too close, or Wikipedia entries sometimes need editing.

THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER

Unless you're being intentionally thick, as Scott McCloud is in the (center) panel from DESTROY!!! below, there is absolutely no reason for subtitles to be duo-specific:

If I can see that the aborted fetus of the protagonist, Tsui Ting-Yin, is screaming and hear its banshee-keening, there is no need to have a subtitle inform me that [TSUI TING-YIN'S ABORTED FETUS IS TELLING ITS WOULD-HAVE-BEEN MOTHER HOW IT FEELS ABOUT BEING ABORTED VIA A HIGH-PITCHED SHRIEK THAT WILL LIKELY CAUSE TINNITUS]. To prove this point, I will continue reviewing the movie in the manner of its subtitles.

THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER

THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER

&

THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

[T]he very heart’s-blood of literature is to draw people
out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and
shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the
mind-blowing. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly
true of science fiction. For what is the point of science fiction if
not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the
strange?

I would frame that argument differently: when I read science fiction, I
want to replicate the wonder my nine-year-old self experienced when he
first read Frederik Pohl’s Gateway.
I had never considered the possibility that the universe might be
littered with the archeological remains of civilizations snuffed out
before the proto-pre-dawn of human history. The thought of it was so
sublime that, a decade later, I watched five seasons of Babylon 5 trying to recapture it. Not that I’ve stopped, mind you, but when you consider the sheer volume of science fiction I’ve consumed in the twenty years since I read Gateway,
I think you can see why that experience is increasingly illusive: more
often than not, what I read contains ideas I’ve already encountered, so
the only avenue to awe is through the quality of execution. There are
exceptions—Perdido Street Station being the one example, Adam’s conceptually audacious novels being another—but
they merely apply meat to Adam’s claim that the nominees for the 2009
Hugo Awards fail to engender what proper science fiction should;
namely, Schopenhauer’s sublime:

When I worked at a used bookstore, I shelved all fourteen thousand, two hundred, and forty-three of his novels more times than I care to remember. But I never read any of them. Even so, I want to go on the record and declare that he deserved better than to be killed by his wife two years before he died.

Tuesday, 12 May 2009

That being what Bones would've said had he taken a look at the "red matter" in Spock's ship. Which is fine because, as Russell Arben Fox notes, the new Star Trek film manifestly works. I don't share the qualms Timothy Burke and his commenters are expressing over the continuity issues raised by the film, because I care more about quality than continuity. Moreover, I think what Abrams did there was damn clever.

(If you ain't seen the film but will this is where you should stop reading.)